Mr. Colmán Ó Raghallaigh:

I might make a point. Last Thursday, the Minister told the Dáil he expected the report to be ready around the end of the year. The timeframe is moving back continually. I agree with everything the Deputy has said, particularly about education, in which I have worked for all my life. It is one thing to educate the young people of the west and then give them a ticket to go and live in Dublin or somewhere else, but what we in the west need to do, and this speaks to what Mr. Devane described, is to educate our young people, which we do in Sligo, Galway and Limerick, and then keep them in the west. The main beneficiary of that will be the greater Dublin area, which as we all know is suffering greatly from overcrowding, traffic and other issues.

This is not an east versus west confrontation by any manner or means. We all have relations in Dublin. I was educated in Dublin and I have no issues with any of that. Instead, we are dealing with a situation where a large part of Ireland north of a line from Galway to Dublin has been seriously neglected, namely, the Border, west and north west region. If Arup does not recognise that and make proposals on the development of rail in that area alongside the billions of euro that have been earmarked for Dublin and the wider east – we do not begrudge them that money because they need it, as we have heard today – and if it cannot give us a meagre €154 million to open a key piece of infrastructure, it will tell us a great deal about how Arup was set up to arrive at those conclusions. The Deputy has asked questions that would be better addressed to the Department of Transport on why these reports keep coming up with the same answer.

According to the CEO of Iarnród Éireann, €1 million has been given to Arup. It is a reputable group of people and I am confident they will recognise, irrespective of what kind of steering group is running the review, that there has to be development in the rest of Ireland on the basis of fairness alone.